John Cage

Snow is suspended. It becomes rare. The wonder is in peril. The extraordinary atmosphere which it induces and which suspends the stifled daily life, moves away from our impatience. Snow is a curtain behind which capitalist issues are going on, the consequences of which are universal and global. Nivose is an attempt to reverse the movement, to fix and revive by abstraction a climatic phenomenon so far condemned by mankind in a process that could be inescapable. Magic operates when the camera catches the flakes in the opposite direction.

In February 2013, the New World Symphony presented Making the Right Choices: A John Cage Centennial Celebration, a spectacular three-day festival dedicated to the music and ideas of John Cage. As part of the festival, NWS hosted a new video installation entitled NWS: 4’33″, created by New York-based composer, director, performer and recording artist Mikel Rouse; which consisted of video performances contributed by Cage fans via a special YouTube site set up by Rouse. The public was invited to record and submit their own video, and visit the installation during the festival to see their work in the SunTrust Pavilion at the New World Center. These videos will be included in an online Archive of the event, a lasting tribute to this defining and seminal artist.

A figure with two wings on a church's roof. An opera is suggested, Madame Butterfly. A silent poem that combines effect and (angelical) truth...

A cinematographic attempt at a maximum of exertion and a maximum of relaxation based on the thoughts of John Cage, Chuang Tzu and others.

Why does Fred look like Charly who looks like Gernot who looks like Udo who looks like Erwin who looks like Leopold who resembles Ferdinand?

The film develops around a series of shots of Gino Marotta's sculptures at the Natural-Artificial exhibition at the Galleria dell'Ariete (Milan, 1968). The images are inserted in a tight montage that alternates natural visions with pure ghosts of shapes-light in motion. The rhythms are marked by the music of Cage. Shapes and colors outline volumes like liquid and bright substances, derived from the intense play of transparencies and overlaps. From a manuscript note preserved in the Marinella Pirelli Archive (Varese), the artist reports: Marotta's sculptures were the pretext I was looking for: they are in methacrylate perspex, transparent and polarizing, with those surfaces made of pure luminous variations: but they were precisely a pretext.